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Summary
The intertwined processes of globalization and capitalism are fundamentally material in expression and are central to understandings of the modern world (however defined). Over the last 50 years, post-medieval archaeologists have engaged directly with the materiality of these broad-scale processes, initially from the standpoint of empirically driven descriptive studies and latterly with more interpretative approaches which challenge and stretch disciplinary boundaries. As later historical archaeology is increasingly characterized by a theoretically and geographically diverse set of practices, insights into the material resonances of globalization and capitalism have become increasingly sophisticated and more broadly relevant to the present day.
Résumé
Les processus entrecroisés de globalisation et de capitalisme sont fondamentalement matériels en expression et sont au centre de la compréhension du monde moderne. Au cours des cinquante dernières années, les archéologues postmédiévaux se sont directement concentrés sur la matérialité de ces processus de grande échelle: tout d’abord, à partir du point de vue des études descriptives conduites empiriquement, puis, à partir d’approches plus interprétatives qui défient et dépassent les limites disciplinaires. L’archéologie historique tardive étant de plus en plus caractérisée par une diversité théorique et géographique de pratiques, nos connaissances des résonnances matérielles de globalisation et de capitalisme se sont de plus en plus sophistiquées et se sont rapprochées de l’actuel.
Zusammenfassung
Die verflochtenen Prozesse von Globalisierung und Kapitalismus sind fundamentales Material im Ausdruck und zentral für das Verständnis der modernen Welt (wie immer definiert). Während der letzten 50 Jahre haben sich Archäologen direkt mit den Materialien in breitem Ausmaß auseinandergesetzt: ursprünglich vom Standpunkt der empirisch getriebenen beschreibenden Studien, und später übergehend zu einer mehr interpretativen Annäherung, die interdisziplinäre Grenzen herausfordert und unter Druck setzt. Da später geschichtliche Archäologie sich zunehmend charakterisiert durch theoretische und geographische Praktiken, ist der Einblick in die materiellen Resonanzen von Globalisierung und Kapitalismus auch zunehmend differenzierter geworden und auf breiterer Ebene relevant für die heutige Zeit.
Processi connessi quali globalizzazione e capitalismo sono sostanzialmente ‘materiali’ nella loro espressione, e centrali alla comprensione del mondo moderno, comunque lo si voglia definire. Durante gli ultimi 50 anni, gli archeologi post-medievisti si sono direttamente impegnati nello studio della materialità di questi processi su larga scala: inizialmente dal punto di vista di studi descrittivi su base empirica, e ultimamente con approcci di tipo maggiormente interpretativo che sfidano e dilatano i confini disciplinari. Dato che ultimamente l’archeologia post-medievale si è caratterizzata in maniera crescente per approcci teorici diversi e prassi variegate su base geografica, la profonda conoscenza della ‘risonanza’ di fenomeni quali globalizzazione e capitalismo è diventata col tempo più complessa e allo steso tempo generalmente più rilevante ai nostri giorni.
Resumen
Globalización y capitalismo son procesos entrelazados esenciales para entender el mundo moderno, sea cual sea su definición. En los últimos 50 años los arqueólogos dedicados al estudio de la época temprano moderna se han centrado directamente en el análisis de la materialidad de dichos procesos, centrándose al principio en estudios empíricos pero descriptivos para pasar más recientemente a enfoques interpretativos que desafían y expanden los límites de la disciplina. La teoría y la geografía que utiliza la arqueología histórica son tan amplias que nuestra visión de los aspectos materiales de la globalización y del capitalismo son muy sofisticados y están adquiriendo una gran trascendencia hoy en día.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Alasdair Brooks and the editorial team of Post-Medieval Archaeology for approaching us to write this article together, and especially for the helpful comments of the anonymous reviewers in strengthening the final article.
Summary in French, German, Italian and Spanish
Notes
1 Johnson Citation1999; Tarlow Citation2007, 7–9.
2 For example, Wurst Citation1999; see also Leone & Knauf Citation2015; Leone Citation2005; Matthews Citation2010.
3 For example, Gaimster Citation1986 cites Marc Bloch, but does not directly discuss capitalism.
4 Butler Citation1967, 1–2.
5 Little remains of Wedgwood’s Etruria factory but, following an emergency campaign by the Art Fund, the archives of his industry and the ceramic collections were recently purchased and protected from threatened dispersal. The only survival of the Etruria factory is one of the two roundhouses which once flanked the symmetrical facade of the structure. The collections themselves are now on public display as of July 2015. See <http://www.savewedgwood.org/>; Tait & Cherry Citation1978; Barker & Horton Citation1999; Brooks & Rodríguez Citation2012; Dawson & Kent Citation2008; Watney Citation1993.
6 For example, Atkinson & Oswald Citation1972; Belcher & Jarrett Citation1971.
7 Oswald Citation1969, 126.
8 Johnson Citation2006, 318.
9 The traditional North American definition of historical archaeology as post-dating the Columbian voyages is given by Deetz as ‘the archaeology of the spread of European culture throughout the world since the fifteenth century and its impact on indigenous peoples’. See Deetz Citation1977, 5.
10 From a northern European perspective, such studies include work by Nordin Citation2012; 2013 examining the impact of Swedish colonial engagements on the homeland. Increasingly, studies of Spanish colonialism in the New World are also addressing the influence of indigenous practices on colonial society — for example, Cornell’s 2015 consideration of the formative impact of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan on the subsequent layout of Spanish American colonial towns. In British colonial North America, another example would be the recognition that a Powhatan cultural geography in effect determined the extent of Virginia’s colonial settlement for a century. See Hatfield Citation2003; Citation2004; Horning Citation2013, 25–36, 159.
11 For a critical consideration of the improvement ethic, see Tarlow Citation2007.
12 Newman Citation2005.
13 Wrathmell Citation1980.
14 Tarlow Citation2007, 16.
15 James Citation2003; McFarlane Citation2004; Horning Citation2012b; RCAHMS Citation1992.
16 Frazer Citation1999; Symonds 1999 ; Orser Citation1996; Orser 2010, 120–125. Numerous authors have raised concerns about the potentially totalizing nature of narratives of capitalism employed in historical archaeology, including Funari Citation1999; Wilkie & Bartoy Citation2000; Lucas Citation2006. See discussion in Horning 2011 ; Croucher & Weiss 2011.
17 Dalglish Citation2005, 262.
18 Johnson 1993 ; Citation1996.
19 Crawford Citation1969.
20 Mitchell Citation1881.
21 Breen Citation2012.
22 Mrozowski Citation1999; Horning Citation2006a; Citation2006b.
23 Breen Citation2012; Horning Citation2013.
24 For an extended discussion of doing history backwards in relation to interpretations of archaeology and capitalism, see Mrozowski Citation2014. For the Ulster Plantation and the Ards, see Horning Citation2013; O’Keeffe Citation2008.
25 Orser Citation1996; Croucher & Weiss 2011.
26 Mehler & Gardiner Citation2013.
27 Verhaeghe Citation1997, 28.
28 Bateman Citation2004.
29 Bloch Citation1953.
30 Mizoguchi usefully considers the influence of globalization on world archaeological practice, noting the ‘emergence of four paradigmatic and geographical blocks ... characterised by different ways of doing archaeology’, but all of which are to some extent dominated by approaches emanating from Western nations. See Mizoguchi Citation2015, 15.
31 For example, Friedman Citation1999 and his ‘Golden Arches’ theory of international relations.
32 CitationScholte 2000, 15–16.
33 The literature on globalization is vast and disparate. Influential works on contemporary globalization include Friedman Citation1999, while considerations of the deeper roots of globalization can be found in Moore & Lewis Citation2009 and Chandra Citation2007. Useful overviews of globalization include Scholte 2005 , Osterhammel & Petersson Citation2005 and Steger Citation2010, while Cooper Citation2001; 2005 explicitly considers the interrelationship of colonialism and globalization.
34 Moore & Lewis Citation2009, 4–7. Scholars of the ancient world have objected to the ways in which Moore and Lewis impose contemporary terms such as ‘chief executive’ on past economic roles, seeing the effort as fundamentally ahistorical and an endeavour to ‘modernize’ the past. See, for example, Morley Citation2011.
35 Wallerstein 1974 . As noted by Johnson 2006, 317 ‘the work of Wallerstein on world systems theory ... has not had any discernible effect on European historical archaeology’.
36 Pendery 1999, 74.
37 Moussette 2009, 43.
38 For selected examples of how archaeologists are challenging assumptions about one-sided colonial equations, see Schmidt & Walz Citation2007; see also contributions in Schmidt & Mrozowski Citation2013; Ferris et al. Citation2014.
39 Helms Citation1988, 2–33.
40 Helms Citation1988, 18–19.
41 Killock et al. Citation2005, 6–16.
42 For object biography, see Gosden & Marshall Citation1999; Kopytoff Citation1986; Apparadurai 1986; Hoskins Citation1998.
43 A considerable body of literature exists that explores the active nature of objects and how objects become things. See Olsen Citation2010 for an explication of thing theory, and Hodder Citation2012 on the entanglement of people and things.
44 Straube Citation2013. For the Jamestown excavations more generally, see contributions in Post-Medieval Archaeology 40:1, 2006.
45 Building on Taussig’s Citation1993 conceptualization of mimesis.
46 Turpin Citation2015, 265–7; see also MacGregor Citation2007. Powhatan’s mantle consists of four deerskins decorated with shells that depict a human, two animals and over 30 circles (generally interpreted as the political units within the paramount chiefdom). See Kopytoff Citation1986.
47 Cooper Citation2005, 93.
48 Sikes Citation2008.
49 Horning Citation2012a; Tracey Citation2015.
50 Gaimster et al. Citation1990, 15–16.
51 Lucas Citation1998, 76–80.
52 Bloice Citation1971, 150–1.
53 As discussed explicitly by Berg Citation2007, 44–5; see also Barker Citation1999.
54 The seminal anthropological discussion of consumption remains Douglas and Isherwood’s 1979 study The World of Goods, which brought together economic and cultural perspectives on consumption. For post-medieval Europe, Bourdieu’s classic work Distinction remains influential in its exploration of the entanglement of consumption and elite power, while de Vries’s more positive read on the engagement of all social classes with consumption is sympathetic to the perspective of Miller regarding the active ability of individuals to employ objects in identity-making. See Miller Citation1987; 2005; 2010.
55 Berg Citation2007, 40–2; Vries Citation2008, 44–5.
56 For example, see the individual contributions in De Munck & Lyna Citation2015.
57 Vries Citation2008, 55; McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb 1982.
58 For example, Miller Citation1987, Buchli 2003.
59 See Dixon Citation2011; Moshenska Citation2014.
60 Wilson Citation2008, 152.
61 For an explication of the Columbian Exchange, see Crosby 1972; 2004 . Diamond’s controversial 1999 study, Guns, Germs, and Steel, has been readily picked up and cited by globalization scholars (for example, see Steger Citation2013), but we would argue that it is far too deterministic in its portrayal of the influence of the Columbian Exchange.
62 Boivin et al. Citation2012, 463.
63 Svizzero & Tisdell 2014, 13.
64 This point was also made strongly by Johnson, but the situation in terms of research within the UK has not significantly changed. See Johnson Citation2006, 324–5.
65 For example, the 2011 special issue of the journal (Post-Medieval Archaeology 45:1), dedicated to Bermuda, includes several articles which address slavery. Crewe Citation2012 considers the meaning of abolitionist messages on ceramics in 19th-century Sheffield.
66 Webster 2015 . This study is part of a larger research project exploring the archaeology of the Atlantic slave trade, and complements the recent shift in maritime archaeology towards addressing the salve trade and its material signatures following on from a critique levelled by McGhee in Citation1998 and Citation2007; see also Flatman Citation2003.
67 Mrozowski 2010, 119.
68 Brown Citation1999; Bowen Citation1994; Bain and Prévost 2010, 28.
69 Fothergill 2014.
70 Armitage Citation1981; Games Citation2006; Citation2008.
71 Hickman 2014.
72 Brooks Citation2009.
73 Schweickart Citation2014, 407.
74 Cooper Citation2001, 206.
75 Brooks & Rodríguez Citation2012, 84. Johnson also addresses the issue of scale in post-medieval archaeology. See Johnson Citation2006, 318 and see also Orser, 2010, 116–120 for a discussion of scale in contemporary historical archaeology.
76 Crossley Citation1967, 66.
77 Muldrew Citation1993, 177.
78 Smith Citation2005, 87.
79 Comaroff & Comaroff Citation2005, 178.
80 For example, Belford Citation2010.
81 Dixon Citation2011.
82 CitationScholte 2000, 47–8; Graves-Brown 2013, 252.
83 Funari Citation1999; Young & Fazeli Citation2013; Mizoguchi Citation2010; Horning Citation2016.